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Re: THEORY: more questions

From:Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...>
Date:Wednesday, November 26, 2003, 0:49
On Tue, 25 Nov 2003 21:07:33 +0100, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
wrote:

> Quoting Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...>: > >> On Tue, 25 Nov 2003 19:49:02 +0100, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> >> wrote: >> >> > >> > That seems to leave English's indirect objects rather hanging in the >> > blue?* >> >> I don't understand. I can't think of a single indirect object in English >> that isn't marked by a preposition, except for possibly ill-formed >> utterances like >> >> ?give it me >> >> for >> >> give it to me >> >> I don't know. I don't claim for one minute to be an expert in English >> syntax. Maybe I'm merely failing to understand some aspect of your >> statement that is at a more abstract technical level than I'm used to >> encountering. > > I think you're simply being a bit home-blind ATM. I'm simply speaking of > sentences like > > give me the scissors > > For reasons I'm not entirely clear on, > > ?give me it > > sounds alot worse to this non-native, but I don't think it's actually > ungrammatical.
There's a conflation, I fear. The sentence ?give it me (eliding the preposition "to") is dialectical, whereas give me it is standard, not eliding nor modifying any element. Oddly, *give the scissors me although formed by the same "to"-deletion, is almost certainly ungrammatical compared to give me the scissors It seems "to"-deletion of recipients only works when both objects are pronomial, maybe? OTOH, ?give me with unstated instrumental object, is seen as a childish form, albeit one which has become almost standard in the form gimme whereas ?give the scissors only works with a non-first-person recipient, and probably only when talking to a child. Paul